ON Sunday, they came just as they do every year.

Veterans of wars past and present, they mustered in the chill, damp November air in the street outside my flat ready for their march into Glasgow's George Square as part of the festival of remembrance.

Normally I would join the crowds lining the street to watch, but that morning I was boarding a taxi and heading to the airport. A few hours later I was in Beirut, a city whose own citizens know all too well about the terrible cost of war.

Right now I'm writing this in another town in Lebanon, right where it borders Syria. All around me are the human flotsam of war, Syrian refugees fleeing the fighting that grips their country.

For decades now, war and witnessing its impact have been such a central part of my professional life that such things have almost become the norm. It's a shameful admission I know, but sometimes I can't help wondering how tedious things would be without this periodic immersion into the world's conflicts.

It was my colleague Anthony Loyd of The Times newspaper in London, a reporter with whom I occasionally worked during the Bosnian conflict, who captured what this feeling means in his powerful book My War Gone by, I Miss It So.

War is strange in that it brings a desire to forget and to remember in equal measure. Ask those veterans who gathered in George Square and elsewhere at the weekend and they will tell you this.

Ask, too, those Syrian refugees I have been meeting this week and they will say much the same, even if their own horrors are, as yet, far from condemned to the past.

Fear, suffering and death are war's common features, but alongside these lie comradeship, selflessness and courage.

I'm lucky in that I don't have to be in war's midst but choose to do so.

In my pocket I have a ticket home to peace and those I love. Not so the Syrians I see all around me right now. There is the young pregnant woman due to give birth who fled at night across the border with her other three-year-old child.

Then there is the old man, his world uprooted and for whom the chances of seeing home again are negligible. None of these people misses war and what it brings. For them war is not a "professional" or vicarious experience but one raw and without an end in sight.

I feel a certain guilt among such people. What right, I ask myself, do I have to enter and exit their suffering so easily?

That they are willing to tell me their stories and value my ability to tell others far removed from their plight is little consolation. It is, though, all I can do.

It was the great Second World War combat photographer Robert Capa who, when once asked what he would most like to be if he wasn't a war photographer, replied: "An unemployed war photographer."

For now, the guns and shells roar across in Syria. Oh, if they would only fall silent once and for all.